Recently I’ve been thinking about what sort of games I want to play—and more to the point, what games I want to see get made.  I’ve narrowed it down to three basic ideas.

• I want to see games that explore what games can do, I want to see games that push the envelope and advance the art and craft of game design…or at least try something to provide a new experience.  Like The Baron, or Manufactoria.
• I want to play games that have deep, interesting and intricate mechanics and/or simulations.  Disgaea is a good example, or Dwarf Fortress.
• And sometimes I just want simple fun.  A recent game is Diesel Valkyrie; a less recent one is DOOM.

Simple Fun

Actually, I have no trouble finding “simple fun” games.  There are many out there, and I never have trouble “scratching the simple fun itch”, so to speak.  So, the other two ideas are more worthy of exploration.

Indie Gaming

Where can you find games that try new things?  Exploratory games, risky games?  Most often in the indie game design community.  A good place to learn about this is The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource).

In order for people to create indie games, they need a platform that is free to design for as well as accessible.  Modern Windows operating systems are pretty good for this, especially with utilities like Game Maker and FlashDevelop.  It’s important to have a control scheme that is easy to use and easy to program, with well-defined inputs.  A keyboard is ideal, especially since every Windows computer has one; game controllers are also pretty good, as they’ve been around long enough to be pretty well standardized.

Interface Innovation

But some people might wonder exactly how innovative it’s possible to be with only a keyboard as input device, especially people who have read about Nintendo’s genre innovation strategy.  It’s true that there are games that use new interfaces in innovative ways, like Boom Blox or Bowling.  However, for the most part I haven’t been too impressed with these new experiences.  I’m glad they were made, but I don’t see much need for me, myself, to go out and play them.

Hardcore Gaming

Actually, the term “hardcore gaming” is pretty useless; see Mitch Krpata’s “A New Taxonomy of Gamers” for a great discussion on this point.  What I’m really talking about are games which require a lot of careful thinking and exploration of mechanics, and also possibly a large investment of time.  They’re often niche games, where terms like “genre addiction” or “grognard capture” can be applied.

If you play a game that has a lot of time investment, you’re usually doing lots of actions over and over.  You want these actions to be as efficient as possible; you want the input interface to be as efficient as possible.  The whole point is to master the interface so you can get in a sequence of commands as quickly as possible.

Snobbery

So, I have tastes that are somewhat niche; I’m willing to seek out non-mainstream experiences to get the sort of enjoyment I want.

To me, this is no different from film aficionados seeing indie films at an arthouse theater.  Someone who really enjoys a medium will figure out what sort of experiences they want and spend most of their time seeking out those experiences; they may also search for completely new experiences, things that have never been done before.  Either way, the mainstream doesn’t usually cut it.

The one part of the definition of “snob” that I don’t like is the idea of “inferiority”.  I have my own tastes, but I don’t believe they’re “better” than yours; I just think they’re better for me.  It’s possible to argue that some games are better designed or better made than others, but at the same time people have valid reasons to play “worse” games—certain specific elements they enjoy, nostalgia, and so on.

The Point of the Kinect

The Kinect is Microsoft’s new input interface for the XBox 360. It tracks your body movements to figure out what you want to do in the game.  The point, as I see it, is to provide a way for people inexperienced with games to get into the hobby.  It’s “the game where you do not need a controller“.

And in my opinion, this is—wonderful.  Yes, it’s awesome.  If more people get interested in games, then game companies get more money and the medium as a whole becomes more successful—and that means more risky and niche titles, more games that I like.  So yes, if you like the Kinect, go for it.  I would never tell someone to stop having fun.

What the Kinect Can’t Do

I don’t think the Kinect will lead to much true innovation in games.  A game where you fight people by actually moving your limbs?  That’s called “martial arts”, it’s been around for thousands of years.  A game where you move characters around on various types of terrain?  Kind of like chess, or perhaps Warhammer.  I don’t see the potential for innovation in game mechanics—I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.  Sure, there can be innovative games on the Kinect, but they would be the kind of games that would be innovative with any interface.

I don’t think the Kinect is good for games that require a lot of time, a lot of intense, you know, gaming.  Think of moving your limbs around, versus twitching your fingers to press a button.  How much energy does it take to make one selection?  How tired will you get if you have to do it 500 times?  The 2002 film Minority Report had a sequence where the main character uses a gestural interface to control software.  It’s laughable.  Who would stand there flinging their hands around for 2 hours?

Of course, it’s possible that the Kinect software will get good enough to detect fingers twitching.  Then all you’d need is perhaps somewhere to rest your hands, and maybe a guide to make sure you put your fingers where you want them to do.  So, some little board with lots of keys printed on it.

Or just, you know, a $40 computer keyboard.

Golf Clubs

So, if you want an easy way to play mainstream games, the Kinect would probably work.  But some people will want more than that.  Some people will want something more suited to experiencing everything the medium has to offer.

Imagine someone learning to play golf.  They buy a set of clubs; if they want to play on a regular basis, they buy a country club membership so they don’t have to play on public courses.  Eventually they will start buying their own specialized clubs, shoes, golf balls…

If you get into gaming, you’re going to want a controller.

(Until the hardware gets good enough to read impulses right from your brain.  That will be super awesome.)

A lot of people have been getting excited about social games.  Apparently there’s a lot of money in them.  But are these games really “social”?

First, Some Basics

By “social games” I refer, really, to Facebook games.  Farmville would be the archetypal example.  I’m sure there are similar games on Myspace, maybe other networks, but I’m not personally familiar with them.

Every creative work is influenced by its medium.  Some take advantage of the unique features of that medium, and that often leads to success.  I believe the most successful Facebook games are highly suited to Facebook as a platform.

What is Facebook like, really?

I believe the most important feature of Facebook is one that does not get mentioned very often.  Put simply:

Facebook is a website that people check multiple times a day.

It’s this factor, more than any other, that influences the design of Facebook games.

• Facebook games often give you “energy to play”.  You don’t have much energy, so you can’t do very much at once.  So you have to come back on a regular basis.
• Energy recovers over time.  If you come back in an hour or two, you’ll have the opportunity to do more stuff.
• Some games have “appointment mechanics”.  You set something up, then you have a certain window in the future where you have to return to get a benefit; not too early and not too late.  You can fit this into your schedule of website visits (8-10 hours, 12-14 hours or several days in the future).

So, the whole point of Facebook games is to be played in short bursts throughout the day.  This is why Adrian Chan tore apart the SCVNGR Playdeck for not featuring social mechanics; the mechanics weren’t social, they were focused on the style of play I’ve just described.  (There were other reasons he didn’t like the deck, but I believe that was the main one.)

Okay, Maybe a LITTLE Social

Of course, Facebook games have features that use the Facebook social network.  Key among those is the ability to invite other users to play the game.

But then, if the invitees don’t have any function in the game, the invites become merely a form of advertising for other single players.

Many games do have features that allow players to interact with their friends’ game states; however, I don’t feel like summarizing them here.  I haven’t yet seen any that, to my estimation, truly tap into the potential of social networking (beyond advertising).

But hey, if you think I’m wrong and you have a good counterexample, leave a comment and we’ll talk about it!

Computers Are Good At Some Things But Not Others

Computers can keep track of vast amounts of information and manipulate it quickly.  Consider a “game state” in Dominions 3: A world made up of 200 ‘provinces’, each of which may be affected by various magic effects, inhabited by different numbers of population, hosting various army units which themselves may be suffering from effects, etc., etc.?  For a modern computer it’s easy to keep track of it all.  And then processing a turn where any and all of those units may move and interact?  Done in seconds.

However, this is possible because all the rules by which the game elements interact are clearly spelled out.  Someone had to decide what would happen in each and every case.  They worked for years to get it up and running.  Most people don’t want to spend the time to work out all that programming.

Consider, also, interactive fiction.  One of the hardest tasks is writing a parser to figure out just what the player is trying to do.  When a good parser is created, other authors will happily write hundreds of games that use it.

Humans Are Good At Some Things But Not Others

Most of us can’t keep track of a hundred provinces or armies.  However, we can weigh possibilities and make decisions in a heartbeat; decisions that it would take months to program a computer for.

The Obvious Conclusion

Recently some people have been taking the idea of a computer game and letting people make the hard decisions.  One example is Parsely.  Parsely brings to mind the environment and interaction of an interactive fiction game, but the parser is replaced by a human.  Humans are, of course, notoriously good at interpreting language.  Therefore, the game plays quite smoothly.  The experience becomes much closer to improvisational theater than game playing, since the emphasis is on humans interacting.

Along the same vein is Sleep is Death.  One player enters a computer-graphics world and interacts with it.  The consequences of the interactions are decided by the second player.  The game affords the ability to rearrange and manipulate game objects as if they were scenery.  The computer doesn’t have to interpret or decide anything; that’s all left up to the players.

Yet another example is How to Host a Dungeon.  This “game” is notable for several reasons.  First, it doesn’t include any meaningful choices, thus it may be inaccurate to call it a “game”.  It’s meant to be a solo activity of dungeon creation; through the course of How to Host a Dungeon, you’ll create a series of underground rooms with a history of habitation by various fantasy creatures.  Play consists of actually drawing rooms on a sheet of paper.  This puts a number of interesting decisions into the player’s hands; If dwarves tunnel near a cave containing water, do they dig into it or leave it be?  How close do they have to be to tunnel into it?  These are decisions the player weighs as they go through the game.  A computer might have to be programmed with dozens of complex rules to make good decisions; a human can make them in a moment.  Not only does this save time, it also lets the player guide the dungeon’s development according to their own preferences, thus making it uniquely their own creation.

Taking this concept a bit further, I could mention Dwarf Fortress.  Of course Dwarf Fortress is known for spending a lot of effort to simulate a plausible fantasy world in real time.  However, as Josh Diaz’ master’s thesis “Dwarf Fortress Gathers At The Statue And Attends A Party” notes, much of the “play” occurs when Dwarf Fortress players interpret, repurpose and guide the events occurring within the game.  The game takes care of what it does best—keeping track of an entire world’s worth of information, while the humans do what they do best—constructing meaning and narrative out of chaos.

Another Perspective—Is This Really So Impressive?

From another perspective, this phenomenon is nothing new.  Parsely is a lot like improvisational comedy, where the players are encouraged to portray interaction with an IF game interface (making use of the associated tropes as well).  Sleep is Death is like roleplaying, only you have scenery on the computer.

I suspect the presentation is what’s new here.  There are lots of people who assume everything in the game has to be calculated by the computer, but this recent crop of games shows that leaving it up to the humans can lead to interesting possibilities.  If nothing else, it lets the players see that they really can do interesting things on their own, and it might even encourage them to explore their creativity even more.

The Future, Part A—Computer Training

Neural networks are computer models for making tough decisions.  They are adaptive, in the sense that they go through a learning phase before being used.  In the learning phase, you give the neural network a lot of data to train it; “This is a possible input, and this is what should be output”.  Once training is over, the network knows how to make those tough decisions (in theory, anyway).  De-automation shows us that some areas of decision-making are still difficult; these might be good candidates for neural networks.  (Assuming we want to re-automate everything; I suspect some people will go that route even if not everyone does.)

The Future, Part B—Composition

Three of the examples I’ve mentioned—Sleep is Death, How to Host a Dungeon and Dwarf Fortress—are all designed to assist in the process of creation.  They explore the division of labor between humans and computers.  What other creative tasks can computers help us with?

One of the things you can do in Dwarf Fortress is dig deeply into the ground and find hidden secrets.  Without spoiling too much (if you want to be spoiled, read about it yourself), these secrets contain both valuable treasures and powerful enemies.  It’s possible to spend a great deal of time preparing your fortress and its warriors for taking on these enemies; eventually you dig down and “crack open” the hidden stuff.  (This was version 40d of DF; those who care will know what that means.)

So, I thought my fortress was ready, but it really wasn’t.  I dug down and released a horde of demons.  As they swarmed up the specially prepared hallway, crossbow-dwarves filled them with bolts.  At the end, champion axe-wielders in full steel plate armor met them in hand-to-hand.

And yet the demons still broke through the lines and started slaughtering civilians.  It was a true mess.  Eventually, however, the last demon fell.

That wasn’t the end of it, though.  Dwarves were sickened by their fellows having been cut down.  Flaming corpses filled the halls with smoke and foul vapors.  Dwarves started going insane from the stress of seeing their family members rotting in the halls.  Some of them even went berserk and killed more dwarves.  I tried to get all the bodies moved into coffins.

Then I ran out of coffins.

I had started a catacombs area with nicely smoothed and engraved rooms holding one coffin each.  When those ran out, I set the masons to make more coffins while the miners hacked more tombs out of the rock.

Eventually the fortress stabilized.  All the bodies either rotted away or were stored in coffins.  The fires went out; food and drink production recovered.  No one else was depressed enough to go insane.

My catacombs have a couple of hallways of exquisite tombs; each room is not that large, but its walls are smoothed and engraved with pictures of dwarven life.

Then there are a couple of hallways with tombs roughly, quickly dug from the rock, a coffin resting in each one.

Then there’s a wide hallway with forty coffins stacked along the sides, each waiting to be moved into its ultimate resting place.

All told there are about eighty full coffins.  The fortress held slightly more than two hundred souls at its peak; it will be years before it recovers, if ever.

If I ever need reminding of the price my mistakes exacted, I just look at the hallway stacked with coffins.  It was not something the designer scripted into the game—it emerged from the choices I made during play.  To me, it’s a single image that encompasses all the tragedy and horror of what happened in this game.

Forty coffins stacked in one hallway.

That is art.

Is an innovative game always a fun game? No.
Does an innovative game always make money? No.

So what’s the point? The point is that every innovative game advances knowledge in some way. Even if only one person plays the game and thinks “Hm, I never thought about that”, the game is a success. That innovation will go on to influence other game makers. It will never be forgotten.

Now, if a game designer wants to create a game that makes money, they will value things other than innovation—polish, ease of play, “fun factor”. And that’s perfectly logical. It’s just that I, myself, believe there’s always a place for games that focus on innovation.

The flow of the game, at least in the early parts, is straightforward.  You visit the Uplink Corporation and take missions (contracts for jobs).  When you finish the mission, you get paid.  If you complete enough missions your rank improves, and this makes tougher missions available (and, often, easier missions unavailable).  Tougher missions require better hardware and software, which must be bought with the money earned from the missions.

But there’s an interesting side objective you can take on.  Certain missions require you to break into bank accounts to discover monetary balances.  Occasionally you will find a bank account with hundreds of thousands of credits—one or two orders of magnitude higher than the money you’ve accumulated so far!

Since the player has been encouraged to break into computer systems—even bank systems—from the beginning of the game, one obvious course of action is to break into a bank account and steal the money for themselves.  It’s difficult, but far from impossible.  After cleaning out one of the well-stocked accounts, the player can buy the most powerful hardware and software available.

This strategy could be thought of as an emergent property of the game’s realism.  However, I think it’s more likely the result of a conscious effort on the part of the game’s developers.  This game mechanic rewards investigating possibilities and orchestrating a breakin that you don’t fully know will work—in other words, acting like a computer cracker—and that’s what the game is all about.  Even without the “theme”, it’s still a delightful way to have a “sidequest” in the game.

Endless Frontier features a number of characters in your party.  Each of these characters is carefully designed and characterized.  Each of them is represented in conversations by several portraits that show various emotions; “default”, “happy”, “grim” and so on.  Some characters have portraits that are quite individual to them; Kaguya has a “flirty” portrait, for example, and Xiaomu has a “just been spanked” portrait.  (Don’t ask, just take my word for it.)

When you visit a town in the game, you’re presented with a screen that has several menu options; “Inn”, “Save”, “Shop” and so forth.  The background of this screen is a street in the town, with several of the character portraits visible as well.  The impression is one of your characters chatting on a street corner while they decide where to go next in town.

The really interesting thing, though, is that the character portraits are chosen randomly.  (“Aleatory” means “having to do with chance or randomness”.)  When confronted with a tableau of random character portraits, the player can’t help but think—”What the heck are they talking about?”.  The character tableaux give the impression of being a snapshot of a conversation.  It really makes the player wonder what the characters are doing.  Why is Kaguya embarrassed and Suzuka exasperated?  The urge to think up a rationale for the situation is strong.  (“Apophenia” is the tendency for humans to discern patterns in meaningless data.)

The ultimate impression conveyed by this little feature is that your characters hang out together, converse, banter among themselves.  It really makes them feel like real people.

Failure is, of course, part of the creative process. Failure is not a bad thing because it helps people learn. The problem is that sometimes people fail in such a way that you really have to question how they’re thinking; sometimes you just feel like their entire way of thinking has to be torn down and started from scratch.

In this blog post I’ll go through the various ways that Braid failed, and what made me angry enough to want to punch someone.

The (Lack of) Story

I would probably describe Braid’s story as a pastiche of Jorge Luis Borges; it recapitulates themes that I’ve seen in Fritz Leiber (The Man Who Never Grew Young) and also a bit of Infocom’s Trinity.

This isn’t a bad failure, of course. The idea of a Borges pastiche is better than the vast majority of games even try to include. In this case, in my view, it’s better to reach far and fail.

The real problem is in the presentation of the story. Someone who talked about it (I feel bad that I can’t remember who) put it this way: “Story? You mean those bits of text I ran past before every level?”. By placing the story bits in easily-skipped blocks of text, they weren’t integrated with the game.

There is an argument to be made that the game mechanics themselves express certain ideas. That’s fine, but there are two problems; First, the text and mechanics aren’t well integrated, so the text is pointless, and secondly I’m just not entirely sure what ideas the mechanics are supposed to express.

False Puzzle Advertising

One of the points that you notice in Braid advertising is that, while playing the game, you can rewind time.  If you make a mistake, like a mistimed jump, you can rewind the game and try again.  In fact, the very first level has a couple of puzzles of this nature.  The rewinding almost works like save states; you can keep trying until you get it right.  The implication is that dexterity and timing won’t be important, and that the game will only test your puzzle-solving abilities.

This impression is false.  The game soon introduces elements of symmetry breaking; some game objects are immune to rewinding, so that rewinding does not produce the same game state as previously existed.  Timing and dexterity are important, and if you thought otherwise, too bad.

Difficulty Cliff

A difficulty curve is an idea in gaming where the game starts out easy and then gets harder. As the player masters the basic skills, they’re prompted to develop more skills, or else hone their skills to perfection. In theory, having the challenges too easy leaves the player bored and having them too hard makes the player frustrated. Hence, there’s the idea that if you graphed the difficulty over the course of the game, it would make a smooth curve upward.

Braid’s difficulty goes up very quickly. In a sense it’s more like a collection of puzzles than a smooth experience. The player is tossed into the game and told to beat their head against the puzzles until they have a flash of insight (more on this later).

What really bugs me about this is that there’s one set of levels dealing with the element of time flowing backward; they gradually introduce the implications of the new mechanic in a very smooth way over several levels. To me, that section has a very smooth curve.

It’s just that that section is only unlocked after you’ve beaten everything else in the game. A messed-up difficulty curve is the kind of thing that happens a lot; it can be hard to get right, and after all it’s a lot easier to create puzzles than to solve them. So, this failure is understandable, but I can’t help feeling that it drove a lot of players away from the game.

The Impossible Puzzle

In the first level, there’s a puzzle I could never have solved.

At this point there will really be spoilers, if there weren’t before.

But anyway, you read that right, in the first level there is a puzzle I could never have solved. The basic framework of Braid is that there are worlds, and each world has several levels, and each level has several puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces are the goals, they’re what you’re trying to collect.

Each world also has a picture frame where you can assemble the puzzle pieces into a picture. Once the picture is complete, you’re finished with the world. (Except for “bonus stars”, apparently, but I don’t really know much about those; they’re not obvious.) Each picture frame appears in two places; there’s one in the main hub of the game (the world select screen), and there’s one found somewhere in each world. So, going through the game it’s obvious that the puzzle pieces are a scoring mechanism. They don’t have any game effect, except unlocking the final world once you’ve completed all the others. The picture frame makes a nice alternative to a progress bar, showing you how far you’ve gotten in the game.

So, near the end of the first level is a puzzle piece that seems impossible to get to. There are no platforms or clouds near it, no enemies to bounce off of. It’s sitting high up in the air, unreachable.

Eventually I got so frustrated with this puzzle piece that I poked about on the internet to find out how to get it (more on this later).

It turns out that some of the puzzle pieces—only the ones in the first world—actually have platform pieces on them if you look closely. Instead of simply collecting these pieces, you had to rearrange them within the picture frame found in the world to create a platform allowing you to reach the last puzzle piece.

Let’s go through all the ways this makes no sense:

• If you thought the puzzle pieces were only a scoring mechanism, you could never solve the puzzle. It’s as if, in some other game, you had to climb up your health meter.
  
• If you were going to wait until you had collected all the pieces for the first world before manipulating them, you could never solve the puzzle.
• If you dismissed the picture frame within the world as being superfluous and only using the ones on the main screen—where you can see them and your progress all at once—you could never solve the puzzle.
• If you assumed that the game would point out all the game elements that were important and make sure you had at least a basic idea of what they did—like it does for every other game element—you could, that’s right, never solve the puzzle.

Walkthrough Bullying

So, if you got frustrated with Braid, you might want to find some hints. Your search might take you to the walkthrough page on the official Braid website.

Spoiler alert: This is not a walkthrough.

Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) apparently takes the position that hints or walkthroughs interfere with the experience of the player solving puzzles on their own. That’s a position that I can basically respect, although I disagree with it. (Me, I believe that very often the sense of relief you get from solving a puzzle doesn’t make up for the frustration you have to go through.)

The problem is that the “walkthrough” doesn’t just say “solve the puzzles on your own”. No, the “walkthrough” actually lures you in with the promise of giving hints…and then it chastises you for asking for help.

This “walkthrough” is more like a hazing ritual. You have to go through a certain amount of pain before you can join the inner circle, and you get humiliated for your weakness.

This “walkthrough” amounts to Jonathan Blow slapping you in the face for not being good enough to play his game.

In a sense it may not be a failure of Braid itself, but it’s a grave mistake by Jonathan Blow that he needs to apologize for before he can move forward.

The basic “flow” of game design and play works like this:

• The game designer creates a game.
• The game designer makes that game available.
• The game is transferred to the player(s).
• The player(s) play the game and derive some sort of fulfillment from it.

Some Notes

The “game” includes rules, play materials like a game board, content, software, anything and everything that is provided to let someone play a game.  In this case, “game designer” is really shorthand for an entire game production company.

The game is “made available” by selling it, publishing it on the web, perhaps even providing a client-server arrangement so the player(s) may interact with the rule systems.

When I say the player(s) derive “fulfillment”, that could be “fun” or “enjoyment”…or it could be “interest” or “engagement”.  Like watching a film; take as an example a documentary about war.  It’s easy to imagine such a film that would be most definitely not “fun”, but also a valuable experience.  So there may be games that will provide an experience that is valuable without being “fun”.  (See Greg Costikyan’s analysis of Grey Ranks.)

There might be games that follow models other than this one, and it might be cool to explore them, but I think this model will serve for the purposes of this post.

The Social Contract

So far I’ve just made observations.  What I’ve described is how games work.  But now let’s think about this further.

When a game designer makes a game available, certain expectations come into play.  In essence, the designer is promising that their game will follow the model stated above.  In other words: The game designer promises that playing the game will provide the player(s) with a fulfilling experience. That’s the entire point of selling the game; this concept underlies every game transaction.  The player(s) play the game because they believe it will provide them with a fulfilling experience.  That’s why they follow the rules.

How can the contract break down?

Perhaps the player(s) follow the rules but the game just isn’t fun.  Well, it happens; a failure of skill on the designer’s part, perhaps.  Not every film is wonderful, nor every book, nor every game.

Another failure of the contract is when the designer wants the player(s) to do something within the game, but nothing in the game tells them this action is available.  In a trivial example, if you publish a game with no instructions, you’re breaking the social contract.  Sure, in certain contexts the controls might be “obvious”, but I think it’s unwise to rely so heavily upon cultural context like that.  If someone doesn’t have the requisite knowledge to play the game, they’ll just be frustrated.  It’s in a designer’s best interest to provide instructions.

(An interesting counterpoint to the previous bit is towlr.  Towlr games are intentionally obscure.  However, I don’t believe this is a violation of the social contract, because the towlr webpage says: “Contrary to conventional design wisdom, the towlr games come without instruction and without explanation. Your job is to discover their secret, and score deliciousness.”  In essence, the instructions tell you that if you attempt to solve the riddle posed by each game, you will enjoy the experience.  I think it’s clear that this fits into my social contract model.)

Some games actually attempt to engender behavior in the player(s) that is contrary to the game rules.  Well, I say “some” but I only have one example at hand; Vampires, by Victor Gijsbers.  You can read through the game’s rules, the author’s commentary, Greg Costikyan’s commentary and several posts on the subject (including a couple by myself and a few by the author).  I won’t say any more about the game here, except to say that I don’t think anyone would, or even should play the game “as written”.

Some games are simply fun.  They provide some sort of pleasure from manipulating the components or developing skill.  One of my favorite games of this type is Time Pilot (it’s available on XBox Live Arcade if you’re interested).  In Time Pilot, you pilot a futuristic plane that flies around shooting enemies; once you shoot enough enemies the “boss” appears, and when you defeat that you get to the next level.  That’s it.  Oh, there are a couple of wrinkles like point bonuses if you defeat all the enemies in a “wing”, but really that’s all it is.  And it’s quite fun.

Games like this I consider “junk food”.  They sate your desires, they provide enjoyment, but they don’t encourage you to “grow” at all.

This begs the question, what do I mean by “grow”, and what games would I consider “important”?  Of course this is all subjective, but this is my blog, so here goes.  I consider games to be “important” if they provide you with new information and new ways of thinking about things, if they encourage your mind to grow in some way.

For example, consider Portal.  Portal’s portals prompt players to think in new ways about space and motion.  Also, its story provides a new twist on the classic “enemy computer” trope, and its setting evokes a particular “research gone wrong” sort of horror.  These are things that guide the player to new thoughts and new information.

Now, some people will say that once you get all the “nutrition” from a game, playing it ceases to give you any new information.  That’s true.  Games aren’t infinitely “nutritive” (although some, like Master of Magic, feature so many emergent strategies that you can “profitably” play them for years).  After playing Portal for 10 hours you’ve probably gotten all the information you can from it, and now you’re just developing your portal-flipping skills.  At this point the game is “junk food”.  Also, some would argue that even a game as simple as Time Pilot has valuable information; there’s the interesting, if sparse, time travel premise, and there are various skill atoms you come across as you learn to play the game.  As no game is infinitely nutritive, no game is entirely junk either…Unless it’s merely a rehash of things the player has seen before.

Let me say that I don’t think “junk food” is bad.  If you want nothing more than fun from a game–there’s nothing wrong with that.  I’m certainly not going to tell you which games you can play.

But just think…If you want to grow, you can’t do it with junk food alone.

Now, as a relatively inexperienced game designer (compared to some out there, at least), I don’t feel as though my games are better than junk.  I don’t claim to be producing worthwhile games, yet…However, I do always try to include some “nutrition” in them, something new, something that makes people think, something that nudges the craft of game design just a little bit forward.  Phantasma, for example, has a somewhat original system of modeling spellcasting wizards, and it also has player-created “sculptures” and player-written books.  Chaostorm is a neat Web 2.0-ish game mechanic developed into a (simple, admittely) browser-based game.  And Aching Dreams takes resource management down to first principles to create a simple but flexible game framework…and, of course, it has sex.

Of course, this model informs the games I make, but perhaps more importantly it informs the games I play.  I’ve played a bunch of match-3 games, of course, for about five minutes each; they’re junk food.  However, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is a game I’ve devoted lots of time to–it illustrates how you can replace “standard” RPG gameplay with other mechanics, it explores the match-3 mechanic in a couple new directions, it allows you to develop your character in ways that influence the match-3 gameplay.  And it’s pretty fun too.  Conversely, I downloaded and played the demo for Castle Crashers, but I didn’t spend more than a few minutes on it.  Sure, it seemed well polished, but it was a four-player beat-’em-up like Final Fight or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…And sure, the animation is great, but game design isn’t about animation, it’s about information.

So, if you design games, are you creating junk food or a healthy snack?  If you play games (and, nowadays, who doesn’t)–How much time do you spend with junk food, and how much with stuff that actually helps your mind grow?  (I’ll admit that my “junk food time” is, well, let’s just say greater than zero!)